


So Lift Those Heavy Eyelids

by SimoneClouseau



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe - Fighter Pilots, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Anal Sex, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Post-Suicide Mission, Switching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 10:14:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12106506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimoneClouseau/pseuds/SimoneClouseau
Summary: There’s a genius to the way Lt. Kane flies, like he understands things about his Hornet that nobody else ever could.An Independence Day AU.





	So Lift Those Heavy Eyelids

**Author's Note:**

> I initially wrote this as a response to a five-sentence prompt meme and a little not!fic follow up in 2016 (http://simoneclouseau.tumblr.com/post/145091151735/military-au and http://simoneclouseau.tumblr.com/post/145118140700/trololoception-replied-to-your-post-military). I've been struggling recently with writing and so I set myself to finishing this, in the hopes that it would jog a little inspiration. All my knowledge of fighter pilots comes from Top Gun, hasty Google searches, and Wikipedia, so I'm sure there's a ton of stuff wrong. 
> 
> Title from an Arcade Fire song.

**Part 1**

They make you drill for the end of the world. They make you drill for everything. Guerilla warfare in the desert, naval battles against rusted out Soviet tanks, World War III, King Kong, Admiral So-and-So’s daughter getting kidnapped by insurgents...what’s the apocalypse compared to that? They make you drill and you know everything that you’re supposed to do when it comes, but they can’t train a person person to look at his end and reach down inside and find a way to keep going. They can’t train you for the emotions, how to fly straight and true with a heart full of desperation. How could they? For all their plans, contingencies, war games, nobody ever expected this. 

But that’s getting ahead of himself...

*

_May 2nd, 2010…_

It burns Jon to say it, to even think it really, but there’s a genius to the way Lt. Kane flies, like he understands things about his Hornet that nobody else ever could. It was like that from the very first time he climbed into the cockpit, wet behind the ears, barely able to tell his ass from his elbow. 

When they started at Pensacola, Jon didn’t know what to make of him. Kane was fresh out of his twelve weeks of OCS and it seemed like he just woke up one day and decided he wanted to fly. Jon was a commissioned marine and he could tell you with a straight face that he’d known he was headed here his entire damn life. He was soloing gliders at fourteen and had his recreational license before he even left for college. Kane had 25 hours of civilian flight school. 

But when they were sent on to primary flight training at Corpus Christi and Kane got into that junky fucking Beechcraft T-6 it was like he was born to it. 

That’s probably still too far ahead. Let’s back it up. 

They met the first day of class in API in the cradle of naval aviation: the ass end of Florida. Jon knew almost everybody else there by name or reputation, but not the blond SNA who slid into the seat next to him and gave him a quick flash of a grin. 

Jon, a gay man in the military used to assessing his options for potential fucks, couldn’t help but run him through his usual diagnostic—he didn’t give off the vibe, not in the way he looked at Jon or at anyone else, so Jon pegged him as straight, easy on the eyes but not really his type. Kane was a little quiet, good-natured about his inexperience, needed a little help with some of his rates, just another student. Jon had slept with another SNA in the program back when they were at the academy together in ‘08, Lt. Stevens, who’d probably be down if they needed to get quick and dirty, and he was pretty sure a new recruit out of California swung his way. There’d be others looking for flyboy tail off base, so Jon wasn’t hurting for choice. 

But then he saw him fly. Fucking game over. 

When they were back on the ground, he’d had that bright grin as he climbed down off the wing of the turboprop, so pleased with himself as he pulled his flight helmet off, and he looked at Jon, and Jon just knew he wanted under Kane, and heterosexual or not, he was pretty sure Kane would take him up on it. 

They fucked the first time that night, Jon on his back, his arms above his head to keep his head from slamming against the headboard. Kane said he’d never fucked a guy before and he’d fumbled and stuttered a bit when Jon first pressed the lube on him. Jon had never seen him anything less than perfectly self-assured, not at Flight Suit Friday, or any of the days they’d had off base. He’d drawn Kane down to the bed and made him watch while he lubed his fingers up and slowly worked himself open. Kane had taken it in with something akin to wonder, but when he’d slid inside, pressing Jon’s thighs back to his chest, he’d taken Jon apart—figured him out and fucked him stupid. Just like that plane. 

Jon wasn’t bothered when Kane pulled his uniform back on after disposing the condom, hightailing it out of there. He wasn’t looking for anything more than a fuck. They didn’t need to talk about it. Jon wasn’t really planning on a repeat performance. Primary wasn’t the place to find a boyfriend, and he was young and unsentimental enough to not want one of those anyway. 

But it happened again. When it was that good? Of course it would. Sometimes at night Jon had an itch and Kane was game to scratch it, and during the day, under the bright Texas sun, he watched Kane show everybody else up. And when they flew together during exercises, the instructors and other students might make a big deal of it, how good Kane and Toews were up there. But it didn’t mean anything. Kane was Navy and Jon was Corps. They were never going to fly together for real. 

At the end of their six months of Primary Flight Training, Jon was ranked first in the class, with Kane dogging on behind him. They got first choice of their assignments for AFT and both selected jet training over props and helicopters—Kane could barely be tied to the ground, and Jon had wanted this since he was three, running around his backyard with a Blue Angel replica his uncle had bought him at the Air and Sea Show in Fort Lauderdale. This was years worth of dreams coming true for him. 

But it meant their time in Corpus Christi was over. The needs of the service had him shipping out to Meridian, Mississippi the very next day, with Kane on to Kingsville, Texas. 

So that could’ve been the end of that. It should’ve been—it was just a convenient arrangement while they were stuck in the middle of nowhere, nothing but flight exercises and each other. The sex was good, but Jon could find that again. He wasn’t going to get corny about it or anything. 

*

Of course it didn’t work out that way. 

There was no reason to expect that it would. Jon hadn’t even let himself think about it, but then he heard on the wire that Kane had also made it into the Advanced Strike Pipeline. He should’ve known really—anybody who could fly like Kane was going to be given any plane he desired. 

Jon also had his choice: the AV-8B Harrier or the F/A-18 Hornet. But the Harrier was Corps only, and he found himself requesting the F/A-18 training. He said to himself it had nothing to do with Kane, but when he reported to Kingsville, he barely got his duffle down on his twin bed before Kane found him. He fucked Jon up against the wall, hard and steady, Jon’s chest and palms braced against the plaster, biting into his forearm, and he realized, mere moments away from coming, he had to stop lying to himself. 

Afterwards, lying on his narrow bed, he traced the scar on Kane’s wrist. It was a nasty one, ragged and white down along his forearm. He’d noticed it before, but he’d never asked, and Kane hadn’t seemed keen to volunteer. This time Kane caught him looking and flexed his thumb. The ridge of white tissue moved over the knob of bone in his wrist. 

“Broke it real bad when I was 18,” he said. “Thought I was going to play hockey in the pros until then, but—” 

There was a strange look on his face that Jon didn’t like, melancholy in place of his usual smile, so he shoved Kane in the side. 

“Jesus Christ, you really did wake up one day and decide to be Top Gun didn’t you!” He poked him again. “You weren’t watching the movie the day you made your decision to join up were you?”

Kane laughed. “Fuck off.” 

When Kane smiled, something inside Jon’s chest hurt. He reminded himself not to be stupid, he was Corps, and Kane was Navy. That was three years on possibly opposite ends of the earth. He wished it were different. That Kane could’ve chosen the marines for officer candidacy on that day he’d just up and _decided_ to become a pilot, because when he was up there with Kane on his wing, they owned the sky. 

*

Be careful what you wish for. 

*

The first alien attack hit barely three months after they earned their wings. It changed everything. The entire world going into a mad scramble for survival. It was like every nightmare out of the worst disaster movie and worse. They’d done their simulations for this, stupid pointless exercises as it turned out. None of it fucking mattered. They were down planes and pilots, caught unawares. Their defenses were swept aside like almost nothing. Jon wasn’t mentally prepared—how could he be? His entire universe tilted on its axis. He was no longer a little boy dreaming of his wings longing to be in the sky, but a weapon, one of the few the human race had left. 

Two weeks later, after the near decimation of his original squadron, the VMFA-115 Silver Eagles, he got a battlefield promotion and was made wing commander of the newly formed VFA-19 Blackhawks with Kane in his squadron. No point in separating Corp and Navy any longer. There just weren’t enough of them. Their hastily assembled squadron was sent to Prudhoe Bay off the coast of Alaska to defend the oil fields. 

*

_August 23rd, 2011. Now…_

It’s dogfighting, day in and day out, barely saving more than they lose. The aliens are relentless, and they’re smart, targeting major resources—oil fields, mines, reservoirs. 

Five weeks of the freezing cold, of no sleep and barely enough rations, they get word. The Great Lakes region has gone dark, some kind of electromagnetic bomb that knocks out all the power. It’s a while before they hear any concrete news, all the networks are dead and none of the news sites have anything. Jon frantically calls home, tells his parents to head for the west coast and the shelter of the Sierras. 

He’s one of the lucky ones. 

It’s stupidly banal really, when the intelligence finally filters out of the blackout zone. It’s not a report, no official, just a broadcast on CNN in the mess hall. Everybody’s too afraid to turn the TV off these days. But Jon kinda wishes that they had today. It’s a shitty way to find out. 

Kane’s family is gone. His hometown is gone. Levelled. Nothing left but dirt. The aliens took out everything. The entire Rust Belt is a crater. All the water drained. If they survive this, if they ever manage to think past the next month, the next week, the next fucking minute, it will be decades before it’s habitable again. 

Kane explodes out of the mess, oversetting his chair. Seabs tries to say something to him, but he ignores it, pushing past them all without a word. Jon’s heart breaks as the door slams behind him. 

He finds him in the chapel, sitting in the front pew. 

“Hasn’t he taken enough from me?” he asks when Jon sits down. He runs his fingers over the scars on his wrist. He’s shaking. They’ve all lost something. They’ve all suffered. But he knows what Kane means. 

“Patrick,” he says, because it feels wrong to call him Kane. Or the happy irreverence of his goddamn callsign: Showtime. What do these designations mean? That they belong to a tribe? The last people left? Once upon a time it was all Jon had ever wanted. Tazer. The word that meant he belonged to something greater than himself. Like they were heroes. He thinks he hates it now. 

The tears start when Jon wraps his arm around his shoulders. They’ve never touched like this before. It feels all wrong. Of course it does. The world is ending. 

*

Something has quietly broken inside Patrick. It doesn’t happen right away. But the cracks are there. He starts taking risks that nobody else ever would up there, flying hard and dangerous, maneuvers that should never work but somehow do. They’ve slept together only once since the Great Lakes Slaughter, but Patrick couldn’t stay hard, and he pulled out and snapped the condom off, pulling his pants back up like it was the old days, leaving Jon naked there on his bed, alone. 

Jon doesn’t push. He tries to understand the best he can. But that understanding stops when they’re up in the air. Up there, Patrick may be the most talented pilot Jon’s ever seen, but he flies Jon’s wing, and Jon’s word is law. Right now, Patrick’s pushing the rules a little, chafing at the bit, but they’re still flying good missions, and while his behavior makes Jon uneasy, it’s nothing he can quite pin him down for. 

Until the day Patrick nearly costs them Sharpy. When they land on the USS Chicago at the end of their mission, Jon’s out of his cockpit first, tossing his helmet aside with a loud crash. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you, pilot?” he shouts, grabbing Patrick’s flight suit at the neck and yanking him forward as soon as he’s on deck. 

Patrick stares up at him mulishly, blue eyes on fire. “It fucking worked, didn’t it?” he spits out. 

Yeah, it fucking worked, Patrick had run the alien bogies right into their own missiles, but...

Jon looks over to where Sharpy’s bird is a smoking wreckage on the deck. They had to put the nets up because the landing gear and all of the right engine were gone, shot out when Patrick went rogue and left him without support. Sharpy’s fine, in the medbay in one piece, but it’s not just pilots that are valuable in this war. It’s planes too. And Patrick nearly cost them both. He lets go of Patrick’s flight suit, anger draining out of him. 

Patrick’s lost. He doesn’t know how to reach him anymore. 

“What are you thinking about when you’re up there, Lt. Kane?” he asks after a long moment. When Patrick doesn’t answer he continues, “This isn’t just about you. It isn’t about your family. It isn’t about our squadron, or the flight mission, or this fucking aircraft carrier, or even those oil fields.” Jon watches the ground crew spray the plane down with fire extinguishers, desperately trying to put the fire out so they can salvage what they can. “It’s about the five and a half billion people left on this planet.” 

Patrick keeps silent and when Jon looks over at him he’s staring at a point beyond Jon’s shoulder. 

“Every pilot on the Chicago represents over three millions dollars worth of investment. Years and years of training. And we’re the only things left standing between humankind and the end of _everything_.” He lets out a sigh and shakes his head. “Get your head right, or so help me god, I will find a way to have you grounded for the rest of your natural life.” 

He leaves Patrick behind on the deck to hit the showers. He feels ill. Sleep doesn’t come easy that night. 

Patrick wakes him up in his quarters so late it’s early in the morning. 

“Sorry, Jonny, sorry,” he says, wrapping himself around Jon. Jon’s exhausted and there’s a bone-deep ache inside him that never seems to go away anymore, but he gets the lube out of his gear, and he lets Patrick fuck him, spooned up behind him on the bed. Patrick’s ungloved, but Jon can’t bring himself to care. It’s the end of the world. Who else are they going to find to fuck here out in the frigid waters off the coast of Alaska, barely able to stay alive. 

He missed Patrick’s dick and the feel of his hands on Jon’s body, the soft running commentary he can never seem to stop himself from making, telling Jon how tight he is, how much he loves the way he feels, how he could do this for days. Patrick makes Jon come on his cock. 

“You’re the only thing that feels real,” Patrick whispers, still grinding his cock in and out in slow little circles. 

When Patrick comes inside him and then falls asleep, still in Jon’s bed, Jon doesn’t delude himself that everything’s better. But in the morning, Patrick seems a bit more present, and when he goes up that day with the rest of them, he’s textbook perfect. 

Jon feels like he can breathe again. 

 

*

They get reassigned to the final assault launching out of Norfolk not long after that. The mission is simple: hack the mothership using a long range frequency that should allow them to drop the ship’s shields and hit it with two 250 megaton warheads. They have one shot, and they’re sending up every single fighter aircraft they have. The Blackhawks have been tasked with guarding the KC-130 Hercules carrying the payload. If they fail, it’s over, the planet is lost, they won’t have the resources left to defend it. 

Jon doesn’t sleep much the night before. Patrick, who’s spent every night in his bed since the accident with Sharpy’s plane, sleeps like the dead. There’s a good chance even if they succeed in delivering the payload, they’re dead. If they survive enemy fire, they may well be caught within their own blast radius. 

When the sun comes up, it’s beautiful, and Jon hates himself for being angry that his very last day on earth looks so fucking perfect. 

The frequency works, and the shields drop, and it looks like they have their chance, but then the detonator on the bomb doesn’t go off. They’re taking heavy losses up here. Jon knows there’s no way they’ll be able to send up another bomb. He drops two alien planes and then ghosts a third, but more just keep coming. The swarm is endless. Jon doesn’t even know how many pilots he has left. 

Jon realizes what he’s going to do about a second before he does it. He circles over the strike zone back toward the mothership and checks where Patrick is, spotting him going full bore after two alien fighters, gunning them down, one and then the other. He’d recognize that flying anywhere. 

“Kaner,” he says over the comms, his chest tight, the nose of his plane pointed at the payload. 

_I’m a lil busy, Tazer,_ Patrick’s voice crackles back, full of the manic glee he always has whenever he’s up in the air, flying at speeds above the sound barrier. 

“I should’ve told you a lot sooner than this,” Jon says. 

_Jonny_ , Patrick says warningly, voice gone suddenly serious, like he knows, like he’s cottoned on to Jon’s plan. He knows Jon better than anybody. Even his parents won’t ever know him as well as Patrick. He’s glad he had someone—no longer so young or so unsentimental—to love, to care for.

“I love you, okay?” Jon tells him. “I should’ve told you that every day.” 

_No, Jonny, don’t, fuck,_ Patrick cries, _don’t you fucking do this!_

Jon watches Patrick turn his plane around, heading back to Jon like he could possibly stop him. Jon throttles the accelerator. He’s gotta make sure that Patrick is clear of the blast. 

“I love you,” Jon repeats just before he makes impact and the whole world goes bright. 

*

**Part 2**

_November 2, 2011_

He’s supposed to be getting on with his life. That’s what the mandatory bitchass weak tea group therapy he’s in stresses over and over. Find a way to let go. To leave shit behind. Start every day fresh. Like he was in some fucking car accident. Like this shit can be survived. His home, his friends, his family, Jonny–they’re all gone. He just doesn’t even want to think about it that much. Doesn’t see how it fucking helps to have a _plan for recovery_ , to find himself again and heal, or whatever shit Dr. Bowman is peddling this week. He’s unfortunately still here, he’s dealing with it. 

But how anybody could expect him to just leave it behind is insulting. The entire world won’t let him. Not when they’re bombarding him with it constantly. The international press has eaten the story of Captain Toews heroically sacrificing his life to save his squadron and the whole goddamn world right up. The Blackhawks, Jonny—they’re legend now. They’re already talking about monuments and renaming towns. Everywhere Patrick goes there’s Jonny’s face printed on newspapers, footage of his flying on TV, pictures of him as a young man, smiling and laughing and happy before the whole world fucking broke. There are the endless requests for interviews, for people desperately trying to know him, to know him the way his fellow pilots knew him. 

But nobody could ever know him the way Patrick knew him. 

Every moment of every day he still relives with perfect clarity the moment he understood what Jonny was about to do, Jonny telling him he loved him over the comms. And the look on Jonny’s mother’s face at his funeral when they handed her the folded flag–stoic, soldiering on. Just like her son. So maybe he drinks too much, picks up a little too often. Anything to stop that feeling, the horrible screaming horror that resounds through his chest like a gunshot the moment _he knew_. 

Sharpy has to scrape him off the floor of a few bars. He tells him to move the fuck on, there are people in worse shape than him. In the military he still gets enough rations. He still has a roof over his head. He still has a job. Patrick can still know that, but also still have none of it mean anything at all.

None of it was worth it. It should’ve been him, not Jonny. 

“Goddamn it. He wouldn’t want this for you, Kaner,” Sharpy says, shoving him into the passenger seat of his car when Patrick stumbles. He burned precious gas to come get him. Patrick should feel guilty. More than he already does that is. 

He laughs bitterly, rests his woozy head against the glass, watching the night sky, remembering what it was like up there when it was just the two of them. Please, please, please, he begs the universe on the cusp of passing out, let it be a nightmare. 

He dreams that it was just a bad dream most nights. That his family is still alive, and his bright career as a naval aviator is only really just beginning. In it, he’ll wake up in Jonny’s bed back in Kingsville, trying to figure out a way to ask Jonny if maybe what they have is more than just fucking before they graduate AFT and Jonny gets reassigned somewhere without him. 

But he always wakes up again. 

He nearly buys it during a routine exercise, somewhere else in his head altogether, nearly navigating himself straight into the side of a mountain without seeing, only catching himself in the last second and then nearly spinning out on his own jetwash. 

“Do you want to die?” Sharpy asks him, when they’re back in the locker room, Patrick pulling his gear off with shaking hands. He sounds so goddamn defeated. “Is that what this is?” 

Patrick has the sudden recollection of Jonny yelling at him on the deck of the Chicago. His fury fading into that deadly calm. No, Patrick thinks, he doesn’t want to die. He’s just not entirely certain how to live. 

“I’m sorry,” he says softly, and he means it for the one man who isn’t there to hear it. 

Sharpy nods though, sighs heavily and places his palm on Patrick’s shoulder. “They destroyed so much, man,” he says. “Don’t let them have you too.” 

After that he does his best to be better. He tries to pull the threads of his life back together, such as they are. He doesn’t have much. Just his trusty Yamaha Supersport and the boxes full of Jonny’s books that Andree said he should have when they cleaned out Jonny’s quarters on the Chicago. He wasn’t sure how much Jonny’s parents knew about them, and he was too afraid to ask, but when she gave him the boxes of books, he thought, maybe they must’ve had some idea. It’s stupid, really, Patrick’s not a reader. They’d be better served with somebody who could use these heavy volumes and appreciate them. But he’d been too selfish to say no. 

When they get stationed out of Miramar, what’s left of the Blackhawks that is, he finds an apartment in La Jolla. It’s got a balcony with a view of the beach. At night, when traffic has died down, he can hear the surf hitting the shore. In California, if you didn’t look too hard, you could almost entirely forget that they very nearly lost the fight for this planet. Patrick tries to focus on the little things. The used knotty-pine bookcase with Jonny’s books on them, carefully organized by genre and alphabetized. The feel of the open road underneath the wheels of his bike. Great pancakes, bacon, and coffee at the little diner across the street from his place. The hum of his Hornet when the APU kicks on her engines. He still lives to fly. Sometimes he’s just got to settle himself into that feeling, push everything else away. _Let it go_. Maybe that touchy-feely kook Dr. Bowman wasn’t so wrong after all. 

One day he’s home in the evening in early spring, heating up his dinner, the leftovers from one of the meals Sharpy’s wife keeps making for him. She can’t hardly cook for shit, but it’s better than his own gustatory attempts, so he’s not complaining. The night is unusually warm, even this close to the water, and he’s got all the windows open, letting the breeze wash over him. He feels pleasantly exhausted after a long day running coastal patrols, prowling for any possible alien sightings. They never find anything, but it’ll be a while before that directive goes away. 

He pops a beer open and takes a swig, going to stand in his living room to look out over the water while the microwave runs, stopping near Jonny’s bookcase and the little frisson of warmth he always imagines emanating from the titles. He takes a deep breath and thinks to himself it’s good that sometimes he can go a few hours, sometimes even a day, without aching for him. 

And then he sees him, standing there on the balcony. An apparition staring at him hungrily, dark eyes both familiar and yet foreign. 

Patrick doesn’t hallucinate. He’s never thought Jonny was actually _there_ when he wasn’t. He doesn’t know what this is, but he sure as hell knows what it cannot be. 

He throws his beer bottle at it and gapes as it—Jonny, the hallucination—dodges the bottle between blinks of an eye, appearing at Patrick’s side in the same moment that the bottle bursts upon the ledge of the balcony, fizz exploding along with the glass. 

“You—” he says, voice choked down to nothing, because it really, really looks like Jonny. 

“Patrick,” it says softly, broad shouldered, looming over him, just the way Jonny used to loom over him, so much taller and yet strangely hunched like he wasn’t trying to make Patrick too aware that he was shorter. 

“You can’t be real,” Patrick says, rising hysteria in his voice. “I saw the flashfire of your plane going up.” 

“I know,” Jonny says. 

“You can’t be—” he says again, but Jonny interrupts him, hands coming up to frame his face, dragging him into a furious kiss that Patrick knows like he knows his birthdate, his phone number, the sound of a puck cracking against his tape, his own nose on his face. That is to say, very nearly natural as breathing. And then he’s clutching at Jonny’s jacket front, thrusting him back against the bookcase full of his John Grisham novels and pretentious fucking stoic philosophers. He tastes the same. There are things that might be a little off about him, but he tastes exactly the same. 

“Fuck you,” he says, vicious and hard, biting at Jonny’s mouth. “Fuck you.” 

He wants to bite and scratch, sink his teeth into Jonny and draw blood, prove he’s real. He’s thinking about how he wants to fuck Jonny through his mattress, punish him for doing this to them both, take him apart because he _can_. 

They fall into Patrick’s bed, like nothing has changed. Like Jonny’s skin doesn’t have strange blue tints shimmering over the muscles and the way he moves isn’t fluid and inhuman. He still gasps the same when Patrick licks over his nipples, he still bucks into it when Patrick runs his fingers over his hole. He still moans when he sits on Patrick’s cock, just breached by the tip. He still rides Patrick so good, bouncing on his cock like he was made for it, like he can’t get enough of how it feels. And when Patrick comes, he’s crying, face buried in Jonny’s throat, arms belted so tight around Jonny’s middle it should hurt. But Jonny lets him crush them together, lets him tangle his fingers in the hair at his nape, hold him still until Patrick’s stopped coming. 

Patrick’s always been good at staying hard after he comes, and Jonny starts up again after a few moments, a slow grind, body flexing, muscles sheened with sweat as he uses Patrick to chase his own orgasm. More tears leak out of Patrick’s eyes when Jonny throws his head back, eyes glowing queerly like a cat and gives it up, fist working hard on his own cock. He can’t seem to stop, not even after, when Jonny’s rolled off of him onto his side, gathering Patrick up in his arms and holding him close, body wracked with sobs. Maybe he’ll drown in them. 

Eventually he’s all cried out, eyes dry and aching, lying there beside Jonny in this soft bed so unlike their standard issue bunks, their noses brushing and their legs tangled together. 

“Hi,” Jonny says, stroking his back, lips tilting up in a smile. “Good to see you again.” 

It’s so any old day normal, that Patrick has to fight the urge not to get furious at him. “What happened?” he demands. 

Jonny tells him then, of waking up in agony and yet stupidly relieved to be alive. Of the way the aliens tinkered with him. Putting him back together like they were building a toy or a car. Of how the relief only lasted a week after the experiments began, by then he’d wished and pleaded anything and everything to die. 

They were interested in Jonny, this strange little creature who’d attacked their mothership and nearly destroyed them. They’d been so curious they’d fixed him just to ask him why. How fixed had meant ‘improved’—replacing his muscle and bones and sinew, the neural networks and nerves, creating a new being who didn’t feel quite the way he used to, or think the way he used to. Sometimes he saw things in his head. Weird visions that turned into premonitions. 

It took him a month to relearn how to move with his new skeleton, to get used to tuning sounds and smells out. His body no longer craved sleep the way it used to, but his brain still required it, unable to parse so many hours of alertness. He thought he was going crazy, unable to tell what was real and fake anymore. Lost in a delirium, he got to the point where he barely remembered his own name. After another month the questions started. When Jonny didn’t talk, they broke him and put him back together again, as easy as playing with dolls. It was months before he came back to himself, and months still until he finally learned how to escape. 

“I can’t really—the things they did to me—I don’t know if I’m ‘me’ anymore,” Jonny says, stroking his thumb over Patrick’s cheek, looking at him like Patrick might toss him from the bed for not being exactly the same as he was. Jonny’s the same in all the ways that matter—his laugh, his touch, the way his eyes crinkle at the corners with that fond look he’s always saved for Patrick. Patrick’s sure Jonny’s also different in ways he can’t see yet, but then so is he. Just try to find the person who comes out of the end of the world the same way they went it. Impossible. 

Patrick is still shaky with disbelief, nerves shattered by a relief so profound it borders into pain, and even despite the impossibility of getting hard so soon after that last time, he pushes the little tube of lube at Jonny. 

“I need to know,” he breathes, because he has to understand what it feels like, has to have something concrete to hang onto, some evidence that he’ll be left with tomorrow. 

Jonny’s physiology no longer suffers the same human constraints as his own, so after asking Patrick repeatedly if he’s sure, he opens Patrick up slowly and sinks himself inside. He explains, voice gravelly and hoarse, holding still as Patrick strains to adjust around the width of his cock, that he hasn’t been on this side of it since he and Patrick started. That there hasn’t been anybody else for years now. Patrick clutches his shoulders tight, shivering underneath him, as Jonny begins to stroke inside, hips moving slow and steady. He works his dick in so carefully, but also smooth and assured, and Patrick briefly nonsensically hates every other person Jonny’s ever fucked. He’d had that thought once before, maybe the second or third time they’d ever fucked, when Jonny had just taken it so good, blowing Patrick’s mind. 

Easy and sweet like molasses Jonny works at him, their harsh breaths mingling, skin shining in the low light with sweat, until his own cock has fattened up, thick and stiff on his belly. 

“Touch yourself, Peeks,” Jonny begs him, eyes glassy and cheeks all flushed up like he’s drunk. 

Patrick almost doesn’t want to, but this has gone on long enough that he knows he’s going to be aching inside tomorrow, body unused to being utilized thus. He comes with his hand barely squeezing down on his dick, and Jonny slams in _hard_ once, twice, while it’s happening, making him mewl. And then he feels the unaccustomed sensation of Jonny coming deep inside him, slicking him up. It dribbles out in a hot uncomfortable rush when Jonny withdraws. It embarrasses him, but he can’t help parting his thighs wider when Jonny looks thunderstruck. 

“Thank you,” Jonny says sincerely, eyes darting over his face, that strange glow in his pupils is back.

“I...” Patrick says, and he’s waited so long to say this the words are almost hard to get out, “...love you.” 

“I know,” Jonny says, lacing their fingers together. 

He breathes out in a rush, squeezing Jonny’s hand. He’s so grateful. 

He finally woke up.


End file.
